Paper
Wednesday, 19 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Community Health Initiatives
A Collaborative Case Management Education Program for Taiwanese Public Health Nurses
Wen I. Liu1, Helen Edwards, PhD2, and Mary Courtney, PhD2. (1) School of Nursing, Queensland University of Technology; National Taipei College of Nursing, Brisbane, Australia, (2) School of Nursing, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Learning Objective #1: Understand the needs of Taiwanese public health nurses’ case management education needs.
Learning Objective #2: Describe the delivery a collaborative education program for public health nurses in Taiwan.
Taiwanese health authorities are increasing the application of case management as a health care delivery model in the community. However, most Taiwanese public health nurses (PHNs) do not receive case management education or training because there are no formal academic programs and few informal programs available. In order to bridge this gap, the study aims to develop, implement and evaluate the effectiveness of a collaborative case management education program in changing public health nurses’ knowledge, skills and practice of case management. This paper presents the development and implementation of a collaborative case management education program. A needs assessment was conducted through a literature review and focus group discussions to confirm the educational needs. Case management theory and transformative learning theory were used as a theoretical framework to guide the program design. There were four main learning activities consisting of: inductive activities; input activities; critical reflection; and integrative activities. The study refined the developed program based on the results of an expert panel evaluation and a pilot study. The program fostered collaboration between case management practice and nursing education. The investigator acted as a learning facilitator to help the PHNs to achieve the learning objectives. A cluster sampling strategy was used. All nursing staff in five districts in Taipei were included in an experimental group and received the educational program, four four-hour sessions, every two weeks. All nursing staff in another five districts comprised the comparison group. There was a total of 170 participants, 80 in the experimental group and 90 in the comparison group. For ethical reasons, the comparison group also received the same program after data collection. The study used a mixed method design to evaluate the effectiveness of the collaborative education program.

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